Election Commission to issue open challenge to technologists and political parties to hack EVMs

The Election Commission is reported to be planning an open challenge for scientists, technologists and political parties in the first week of May to prove the temporality of EVMs. The allegations of tampering of the Electronic Voting Machines had emerged after Aam Aadmi Party chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had informed the media that one of the EVMs used in UP polls only voted for the Bhartiya Janata Party, irrespective of where the voter clicked. He had also asked the Election Commission to go back to ballot boxes in the MCD. Kejriwal and his deputy, Manish Sisodia had even addressed a press conference saying that no developed nation in the world uses EVMs since their software can be tampered with.

Earlier yesterday, the Bahujan Samaj Party, led by former CM of Uttar Pradesh, had staged a nationwide protest against the tampering of EVMs in the UP and Uttarakhand state assembly elections, to “benefit BJP”. The BSP workers had held demonstrations in all 75 district headquarters if UP and other party headquarters across the country to protest against what they termed as the “murder of democracy”. Opposition party members had also met unitedly to take up the issue of EVM tampering in the recently concluded elections. On April 10, opposition leaders had decided to take the matter to the Election Commission with the demands that their concerns were genuine and needed to be addressed.

The opposition leaders demanded that the paper trail of voting should also be introduced in all future elections to come. In the face of these allegations, the Indian National Congress had also been pushing for the use of ballot papers instead of Electronic voting machines. Opposition leaders told media that those free and fair elections were basic building blocks of a democracy and any erosion of these rights needed to be addressed forthwith and in the right earnest.